One of the technical advances that benefits authors who are building their readership is the availability of print on demand--meaning that if a dozen people order my book, the printer prints a dozen copies, and if thousands of people order my book, the printer prints thousands of copies. The upside is no warehouses, or closets, filled with excess inventory. The downside seems to be that the printer may not quality assure a run of a dozen copies as carefully as a run of thousands. A reader reported that she had ordered The Sense of Death from a used book seller on Amazon--when she received it, she noticed that the cover had unprinted white bands around the top and right side but she excused this cosmetic defect and plunged into the story. Having ordered the book in part because of its Chester County setting, after a chapter or two she began to wonder when the action would move from Kuwait to Pennsylvania. Becoming suspicious, she checked the title page and found she was reading Fateful Ops by one James Shelley.

So this is an alert that if you are reading a book with a (perhaps defective) Sense of Death cover that starts any way other than "Ann Kinnear followed her brother, Mike, the distraught mother, and two body guards down the alley of the Baltimore slum, wearing the sweatshirt of a girl very likely dead," you have an impostor! If you purchased it through Amazon, they will give you a refund but I would love to know about, and collect, any such defective copies!

In happier news ... work continues, albeit slowly, on The Sense of Reckoning. This sequel will have Mt. Desert Island, Maine as its primary location and Wade and I will be making trips up there in June and August for me to do research (and for Wade to work on his photography book about Mt. Desert).